Lighting the Way: How Alberta’s Emily Spencer Kerby Inspired Change for Women

By Gayle Simonson

During The United Church of Canada’s Centennial, we will be sharing historical articles in our e-newsletter and on our website. Thank you to Gayle Simonson, an experienced researcher & writer and a volunteer with the United Church Archives, who will be writing several stories.

“The church today is not dealing with the woman of ten centuries ago, but with the modern twentieth-century woman – an educated, reading, thinking woman, and a ‘not-afraid-to-express-her-opinion woman’ of the year 1928.” Under the pen name Constance Lynd, Calgarian Emily Spencer Kerby was not afraid to express her opinion!

She was the daughter of a Methodist minister and as a young woman, became principal of a public school in Paris, Ontario. However, when she married Rev. George Kerby in 1888, she was forced to resign from teaching. When her husband accepted a call to Central Methodist Church in Calgary in 1903, Emily became very involved both in church and civic affairs. In 1911, George became principal of Mount Royal Junior College in Calgary. According to Anne White in her book A New Day for Women: Life and Writings of Emily Spencer Kerby, Emily was appointed co-principal, along with George, and “taught the junior grades for years, but officially she was never recognized in these capacities by the board of directors of Mount Royal College and she never received even token remuneration for her services.”

No doubt because of her own experiences, Emily worked tirelessly for women’s rights. She was one of the founders of the Calgary YWCA and worked with members of the “Famous Five” in many capacities, including work with immigrants and leadership in the Calgary Local Council of Women.

She was very concerned about women’s place in the church. Does language influence attitude? She believed so! In the Calgary Herald in 1922, she recalled that as a child: “We believed that God did not think much of women. We were here for one purpose, to make this world nice and homey for the men
 The preachers were always ringing the changes on the awful peril of ‘women and wine,’ so I had a sort of feeling that some day we might be legislated out of existence, like the whiskey, and it behooved us to mind our Ps and Qs.”

She certainly saw the church as less than liberal. In the same article (three years before the United Church was officially constituted), she questioned denominational focus. “These were the days when the Presbyterians preached ‘predestination,’ the Baptists salvation only by the water route; while the Methodists had a wider line ‘free grace.’ It sounded wider but when you got on, you found that they were all running on the ‘narrow gauge.’”

One of her strongest beliefs was in the right of women to be ordained. When a Rev. Thomas wrote an article in Chatelaine in 1928 opposing such ordination, her rebuttal was strong.

“What womanhood is asking is not some corner in the sanctuary where she may ‘appropriately render service’ but freedom to work where she deems best. It is not an entirely new thing, there are a number of ordained women ministers on this mundane sphere
(Doctrine) has gone the way of the tallow candle, the idea of a flat earth, as well as the fable that man (the male) was ‘lord of creation.’
It is not feminism or any other ism we are seeking, but liberty.” To the argument that ordination “has always been restricted to men,” she replied “Has been is never a reason for anything; lots of has beens of the past have become are today.”

It took another eight years before Lydia Gruchy, who was already well-qualified (apart from her gender) when she had first applied for ordination in 1926, became the first woman to be ordained by the United Church of Canada.

No doubt that ordination and those that have followed owed much to women like Emily Spencer Kerby who were not afraid to express their opinions!